He Only Comes Out at Night

He's writing, directing, or starring in six movies in the next year. Johnny Cash is singing on the album he's making. His fifth wife is one of the most beautiful and talented actresses in the world, and he's hardly seen her in five months. He can't sleep in his own house. Billy Bob Thornton has trouble sleeping at all.

Billy Bob Thornton is waking up. He's been working a lot, making a lot of movies, so he's real tired. He's been making a record, too, after hours. The voice of Johnny Cash, in duet with Billy Bob's own voice, streams from the speakers. They sound pretty good together. Marty Stuart, the producer, is up from Nashville, and he's burning CDs tonight here at the studio, and it's late, after 2:00, all the girls have gone home, and Marty's switched from champagne to Mountain Dew. This is the first time he's heard the full mix. "This record is tryin' to be something," he says to Jim, the engineer. "It's comin', it's comin', it's comin'. I see its little head."

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Billy Bob's been asleep on the couch, which is funny, because normally he needs to be told to go to sleep, and Marty says this is the most rest he's gotten since 1979. "I've wore his ass out," Marty says, even though he's known Billy Bob only a couple years. As Billy Bob's mother says, her boy's been "keeping the roads hot." It's a composed sleep, no more than a half hour or so--his face has not gone slack--and it seems as if he's beginning to stir. His hands are still folded between his knees, his head bowed, chin to his chest. His cap, which reads HENRY SWING CLUB, is pulled low. His skin is amber, the color of whiskey. A short-sleeved bowling shirt covers most of his tattoos, but one peeks out from under his left sleeve. He wears a black leather band on one wrist and black jeans and black tasseled motorcycle boots, which are starting to show signs of life. He is a parched and worn forty-five, but in sleep he has the aspect of a baby. People want to stay around and make sure nothing bad happens to him. A hand goes up to his face, an index finger softly rubs the bridge of his nose, and then the hand goes slack as he dissolves again into sleep. He is clean-shaven. He looks like a farmer, not a movie star.

This is Billy Bob's couch, in the recording studio that also belongs to him, in the basement of his new house in Beverly Hills. He's owned the place since June, just after he got married to Angelina Jolie--he calls her Angie--and they paid more than $3 million for it. The house is eleven thousand square feet, and it has this recording studio in the basement, which is a big reason Billy Bob wanted it. Slash, the former guitarist for Guns N' Roses, lived here before. Billy Bob's a Hollywood guy, yes, but his music is important to him, and this is not going to be one of those actor-wants-to-be-a-rock-star records, so he doesn't talk about it much. But the studio is a comfortable room, and he likes it. He hasn't really unpacked yet. Boxes are stacked against one wall alongside a framed Pink Floyd poster. There are a couple Oriental rugs, an acoustic guitar, a box labeled BILLY BOB'S DRUM KIT.

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Billy Bob lifts his head and squints for a second, and then suddenly he is all awake, as if he had never been asleep. He hears Johnny Cash. "I think his voice is a little hot," he says softly. Marty's sitting at the soundboard. He adjusts a few knobs. Billy Bob wonders if they should get Cash to record his vocals again. Marty says, "It's easier to sing to Mount Rushmore than to have Mount Rushmore sing to you."

Then Marty says, "Time to go, cuz." Okay, enough work for tonight. Time to go to bed.

Billy Bob gets to his feet and heads upstairs. He scrapes his heels when he walks, as if the boots are weighing him down. On the landing, he passes a huge arrow pointing back down to the studio. There's a sign on it that reads THE SNAKEPIT. Upstairs, the house is a construction zone. Only one room is finished. Newspapers mask the floors. Buckets of paint are stacked along the walls in the foyer. Angie's in London, working--she left in June and will be back in January--so he's in charge of the renovation. The bedrooms on the second floor all have sliding glass doors that overlook a small outdoor pool. Billy Bob likes that it has the feel of a motel and wants to preserve that. "I'll never live a normal life," he says. "But I try to keep bits of it in my life. Just the idea of having a house, of buying one, knowing there's someplace to call home."

He walks over, flips off the big TV, which has been playing on mute all night, and then goes to the front door. "Come on, we're goin'," he says. He steps out, lights a cigarette, and locks the door. He won't be sleeping here.

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"Nooo sir," he says, heading for his truck. "Not until a guy comes and checks the place out for snake eggs."

The house may have a snake problem. Slash liked snakes and kept them in cages and boxes and pens all over the house. Billy Bob can't abide snakes. He hasn't yet spent the night in the house, and he won't until the snake-egg guy comes. He doesn't live in places easily. He once lived in New York City for ten hours before driving back to Arkansas, defeated and afraid. Tonight he's going to sleep at the Sunset Marquis, the hotel where he's lived off and on for years.

When he gets to the hotel, he'll call his bride, who'll just be starting her day. Well, maybe he'll call her. He's not sure. "It's one of the things I like about this marriage," he says. "I was always afraid in relationships before, but I'm not afraid of her. Well, I am afraid of her; I told her that once. First I told her I wasn't afraid of her, and then twenty minutes later I told her the opposite, that I was afraid of her." So maybe he'll call.

This is an early evening for him. He's got to get up at six to cut hair because he's in a movie. He's playing a barber.

It's a great night out, warm, swimming weather, but all the Beverly Hills mansions on Billy Bob's street, all built during the same few years--late twenties, early thirties--for the first generation of Hollywood royalty, are dark now. Who could be in bed on a night like this? It's going on 3:00, and so Billy Bob's boots and his voice echo a little as he shuffles toward his truck. He's looking at the dark houses. "I hate people who go to sleep early," he says.

He will never live a normal life.

So he went to work today, made some film, negotiated some deal. All real work in the adult world. A bunch of extras lined up at sunrise for haircuts. "Most nervous extras you ever saw," Billy Bob says. He gave a couple of flattops with antique clippers. It's a Coen brothers film, known currently as The Untitled Barber Project. He is, by all accounts, a delight to be around on the set, any set. He is kind, funny, and inspiring to other actors, and reverential about the work, having had a strange sense of hillbilly destiny about it ever since his mother told him not to worry, he'd make it, one day he would work with Burt Reynolds. (He has.) He's got six movies coming out in the next year, four of which he's acting in and two of which he directed, including All the Pretty Horses, the $45 million adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel, which will be released at Christmas. The Gift, which he wrote about his mother, will come out at the same time. He's never been busier and never been more tired; he's got a cough, and there's so very much daytime work to do, so many decisions to make, so many people to take care of, so much writing to get done, so many stories to get out of himself before it's too late. "I've got so much shit backed up that it almost gives me an aneurysm," he says. "I've got at least another twenty movies in me."

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But after dark, Billy Bob's mind seems so starved that he won't sleep voluntarily or easily; he never has since he was a kid, and at these times he has been known even to seek out the interesting company of those he doesn't know very well, and he is disappointed when they don't have the stamina for his hours. "Oh, no, come on, you can't leave!" he'll say.

The bar at his hotel is called the Whiskey, and the candlelit patio out front, with its low wrought-iron tables, is Billy Bob's nocturnal office. There's always somebody or somebody's entourage here. Blond, lithe young things everywhere. And lots of musicians; there's a recording studio in the basement here, too. And everybody touches everybody else here. Little touches, lots of hands, which is fine with Billy Bob because he's from the South, and there they drape themselves all over you.

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Billy Bob keeps pretty regular hours here, and the Reverend Billy Gibbons from the great ZZ Top drops by sometimes. He's here tonight, and this is cool because it was not very long ago at all that Billy Bob was the completely unfamous drummer of a ZZ tribute band, Tres Hombres, which Gibbons now graciously calls "the best little cover band in Texas." And earlier, Billy Bob jammed in an upstairs room with Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes. And now the Irish director Jim Sheridan pulls up a chair, and Billy Bob talks to him about boxing movies because that's something that Sheridan knows about, and Billy Bob's thinking about directing a boxing movie for Miramax even though he's said no to all studio films, forever ("Well, at least with Miramax you know whose ass you're kissing"), and Lord knows how he'll find the time and preserve his health, but he's already seeing scenes in his head, so he figures it's the right thing to do.

This is a night, a few minutes, really, at the Whiskey.

And life at the Sunset Marquis has other rewards. There's a real nice gym that Billy Bob uses when he finds himself in bouts of self-improvement. He sometimes works out in his cowboy-and-Indian pj's, and he'll wear Angie's pink underwear. "Once I was lifting weights, and I thought they were hidden, but some guy kept looking at me strange," he says. "Finally, I said, 'They're my wife's.' I don't think it's strange at all. I wear them to the set some days. I like having her close to me, you know"

Another good thing about the hotel is that everybody knows him here, and the bartenders at the Whiskey are as much as he'll indulge himself in psychotherapy anymore. Along the way, he's entered therapy a few times and even tried it with a couple of his ex-wives when things started souring. But he doesn't trust it. "People in L.A. think you learn by therapy. But you learn by living. I mean, if you've got to get over hav-ing your puppy run over when you were nine, fine, but you've got to keep living.

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"See, I've fucked a lot of things up. I've been wrong. In relationships, I've been, like, not present. Or doing some wrong things. People talk about working on things. I don't like to work on things. I never like working on things. When I write, I don't work on it. I start, and I finish. If it don't come out in one long stream of consciousness, it ain't for me. I don't want to construct when I love, when I write. I don't want to go to couples therapy to solve a relationship. I don't want to work on it. I don't believe in it, never have."

Billy Bob had been with the actress Laura Dern for three years when she went off to make a movie. When she got back, Billy Bob was married to Angie. He knows that lots of people out here are sympathetic to Dern's side of things. "Others may say that you left our girl and married someone else," he says. "But it made me happy and somebody else happy. I'm sorry it caused pain."

As the evening unwinds and the foot traffic slows down, Billy Bob chain-smokes and drinks bottles of water and hangs out with the unfamous Whiskey denizens, talking about All the Pretty Horses and his idea of the movies. He finished the film some time ago but continues to edit, tweak, and fight battles over every little thing. He went to test screenings. "Where will people really hate this?" is what they're for, Billy Bob says. "And the studios use those numbers to try and convince you to make the changes they wanted you to make all along."

He knows the audience out there is finicky. "You've got people who only want to see someone screw an apple pie. But some people are sick and tired of it. They want raw stuff again. We did the movie the way they used to do it."

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All the Pretty Horses is a modern epic, with "interiors out of Sling Blade" and "outdoors that look like John Ford," with a big budget and big stars, directed by a guy who's never been trusted with more than a few million dollars before.

"I think the natural tendency these days is to use one of the big guys to direct. I'm not one of them."

Out of nowhere, someone asks, "When are you going to London?" Billy Bob's fear of flying is famous. Before he gets on a plane, he'll call his mother, who is psychic, to ask her if it's safe. He'll go over there on one condition, he says--if Angie'll take him on the Jack the Ripper tour.

It's quiet for a minute, and then Billy Bob speaks. "You know she won't do anything to hurt me, because she knows it'll hurt her more," he says.

He orders more cigarettes and gets up to go pee. As he's walking back, he's already talking. He seems excited, maybe exercised. "Did you ever look at a woman when she's asleep, and you think, Who the fuck is that?" he says, and sits down. "And, like, the moonlight's coming in when you're sleeping next to her at night and you can kind of see her face--and she looks like a fucking monster? This might be somebody you've been with for years. And you look at her, and it's like, Who in God's name is that? Why--she's a stranger. What is she doing here? I don't even know her. And much of the daytime, you're like, 'Oh, honey, I love you. Are you okay? How was today?' But when she's asleep, that's how you really feel about her."

Billy Bob bleeds Cardinal red, but the Dodgers will do for tonight. He got good tickets and decided to catch a game. Back in Malvern, Arkansas, Billy Bob was a hometown baseball hero, the promising kid who got a major league tryout at eighteen, got nailed by a bad throw, and broke his collarbone. "There's nothing in the movies or entertainment that feels like the third pitch that strikes a guy out," he says.

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A couple years ago, after Sling Blade made him famous, he was invited to throw the first pitch at a St. Louis game. He drove all night from Little Rock in a rented limo after a day of filming. "When I walked out there to the mound with a Cardinals shirt on, it was like a dream," he says. As a surprise for Billy Bob, Bob Gibson was behind the plate, crouched down in his street clothes. Gibson was his boyhood hero. "I learned to throw a slider from his book when I was a kid. So I thought, Shit, I'll try it." He threw his pitch. Gibson walked out to the mound afterward and said, "That was a hell of a slider. Where'd you learn that?"

Billy Bob remembers that his father hung a tire up in the yard so that he could practice his pitching. "It's the one place my dad and I connected every now and then," he says. He looks around Dodger Stadium, shrugs his shoulders, and squints. "Or maybe that's my fantasy."

Billy Bob was not close to his father. Billy Ray Thornton was gone a lot, teaching and coaching at small high schools out of town, mostly basketball. Billy Bob says that every film he does is a reckoning with his father. "In my movies, there's either shitty fathers, absent fathers, fathers that you want their approval. Or the father's just not there. He died or whatever." In Sling Blade, when Karl Childers goes back home, his father's only greeting is, "I ain't got no boy. Now, why don'tcha get on outta here and let me be."

At the ballpark, Billy Bob sits next to a suburban lady and her nephew, who is a high school catcher. They're gabbing away about the mechanics of baseball, and Billy Bob focuses significant attention on the pair, giving advice, telling stories. But every time a foul ball is hit up into the stands, Billy Bob's gaze follows the ball. "I worry about people," he tells the lady.

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At the game, he wears jeans and a plaid shirt unbuttoned and an Animals T-shirt underneath. He is awfully lean.

His weight has been the subject of some speculation that perhaps he's not well. He says he's six feet tall and now weighs 140 pounds, which he says is his natural weight. And he has quick recall of every pound gained or lost during his film career. For Sling Blade, he weighed 175, because the backwoods Frankenstein, Karl, needed to be bigger than Billy Bob. For U-Turn, 195. Primary Colors, 170. Armageddon, 155. A Simple Plan, 145. And for Pushing Tin, he was down to 130. He's skinny by nature, but sometimes he just doesn't eat enough, or he forgets to eat at all.

It's good that he's got a cook and assistants around him. During shoots, studios hire trainers for him. Before he had these people, before he got famous, back in the days when he couldn't get hired as Redneck No. 4 (all those jobs went to guys from New Jersey) and he was trying to write in between shifts at Shakey's Pizza, he landed in a Los Angeles hospital, almost dead from a heart condition brought on by malnutrition.

Longevity has not graced the Thornton men. His younger brother Jimmy died at thirty of an infection that inflamed his heart. His father died of lung cancer at forty-four.

After the game, Billy Bob's in the car talking on the phone to his most recent ex-wife, Pietra, with whom he has two young sons. "Don't make any plans for Friday night. We can make a dessert like strawberry shortcake or something like that." He's sweet and kind to her now. It's late, but his kids aren't asleep. One of his little boys announces over the phone that he's trying to kill a spider. "Your mom ripped his body off? Wait, what--the spider's on his back, shivering with a chicken bone in his mouth? Well, that's a huge spider. Oh, that's the dog. Okay, honey, did your mom tell you that I'm coming Friday night and we're gonna cook? We're gonna make something, just you and your brother and me and your mom. You sure are, baby, you are the luckiest boy. I love you. Goodnight, baby."

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The house is rockin', sort of. In the one finished room, Billy Bob's trying to convince Odessa, his young assistant, that he always wanted to "fuck a midget."

"I always wanted to fuck a midget," he tells her in earnest. "I just wanted to see what it was like. I don't anymore. But didn't you ever want to?"

"No!" Odessa yelps in a slurry North Carolina accent. She's twenty-five, pretty, and has worked with Billy Bob for a couple years.

"I always wanted to just pick them up by the ankles," Billy Bob goes on. "Think of all the things you could do with 'em. You can pick 'em up, turn 'em upside down by their ankles." He holds up an imaginary midget, shakes it a little.

Then he's slow dancing, loving the midget up and down. Odessa backs off a bit. Kristin, another assistant, is on the couch with Odessa's pit bull, Percy, giggling.

"I've seen midgets fucking," Billy Bob says.

"You've seen it?" Odessa asks.

"Of course!" he says.

"What do you mean, of course? Like everybody has?"

"Not like everybody else has," he says. " 'Of course,' like I have."

"I don't ever want to see that," Odessa says. "It's just wrong."

Marty Stuart comes whistling up from the studio. "More bubbly?" Billy Bob asks, cackling. He's broken out champagne, ecstatic that he wrote a new song tonight. And that's as good a reason as any to make this night the first party in the new house.

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"Slash had a room full of iguanas over there." Billy Bob points past the bar. "Man, I can't stand a lizard. I don't like that skin, I don't like the way they look." Percy the pit bull ambles over and rubs against Billy Bob's leg. The dog's got a long, mean scar on his back. Odessa rescued him from somewhere up in the Hollywood Hills. It's one of the things Billy likes about Odessa, that her heart's so big. Another thing is that she genuinely doesn't seem to know or care who's famous and who's not, except for the day she saw Rhea Perlman on the street and just about lost it.

"Marty and I were talking today," Billy Bob says, "about how in the South it's all right to beat a dog."

He and Marty are trying to work each other up.

"It's kind of a way of life," Marty says. Both men are laughing, their shoulders shaking. "There's a place in Nashville," Marty says, "where you could get braces for your dog's teeth. The dog dentist. If your dog had buckteeth, you could get him braces."

"Oh, well, that's just ridiculous," Odessa says.

"Not if you're a buck-toothed dog!" Billy Bob says.

Ime Etuk walks in, a stout, soft-spoken black man in his twenties. Ime's an assistant director around town and Billy Bob's bowling buddy.

"You got a marijuana cigarette?" Billy Bob asks Ime.

"Not on me," Ime says.

Billy Bob is happy and loose, and he wants to have fun. He wants to have fun like Sinatra did, all night and whatever the hell he wanted. He can't wait for the house to be up and running so that he can get a little of that Southern Rat Pack feeling. A pool table, some Foosball, and a Velcro room of his own design.

"We tried to call everybody," Kristin says. "We told them it was a pajama party."

"What's wrong with the world?" Billy Bob says.

"Everybody's tired," Kristin says.

"Well, I'm tired too."

The big-screen TV is on but muted. Bill Clinton's face appears. "When he leaves office, he's going to be tempted," Billy Bob says, pointing at the screen, exhaling a Marlboro. "Chasing pussy is a form of Tourette's syndrome. The same thing that makes you want to drink or kill or build cabinets or whatever. It's an itch that you've got to scratch. And once you've scratched it just right, you form a habit."

They've hung out, Billy Bob and the president. Clinton screened Sling Blade at the White House. "I like the guy," Billy Bob says. "If he was asleep right now on that couch, with his socks on and gray pants, he'd start drooling, and you'd look at his socks, some kind of fucking Armani socks, and he'd be laying there, and you'd look at him a little bit the way you look at your son or your daughter or your brother. You'd look at him with pity. I mean that in an endearing way, like he's just one of us."

Alex, Billy Bob's chef, shows up, along with a blond actress and a producer and a guy in a suit. Alex says that during the filming of All the Pretty Horses, she had to call Arkansas to "find out from his momma how to make chocolate gravy and biscuits." Billy Bob veers into a story about the night he saw a man barking his ass off in a grocery store. This was in Santa Fe late at night, after a day of shooting All the Pretty Horses, when Billy Bob and a couple of the girls were looking for a midnight snack. "We've always been addicted to various kinds of cereal," Billy Bob says.

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"Cap'n Crunch!" Odessa says.

"Golden Grahams!" Kristin says.

"There was a guy there barking his ass off, just throwing his head back, doing the whole thing. I love that shit. I love that shit!"

The party never becomes more than Ime, Marty, a couple girls, and a dog on the couch. It's a work night. The girls want to go home.

"Will you call me at 5:30" Billy Bob asks gently. "And again at 6:00? I need like nine wake-up calls."

The girl are gone

"It's a holy day," Billy Bob says softly. "Elvis died today." When Billy Bob was two, his mother took him out to the highway to watch as the King's bus passed by their little town. They stood there by the road, waving.

He stretches out on the couch, his physical depletion starting to show. His enthusiasm is faltering. He seems tamed. "I know I'm compulsive," he says. "I'm hungry for the horrible shit, but I can't do that. Not anymore. I got something good, and I'm not gonna mess it up." It's quite late, going on 2:00, and he's tired and ruminative all of a sudden. He's thinking about his father. "Some of the things he loved are things I love, even though he and I didn't know each other or get along. And I have some of his traits." He says that when his father got upset, he'd go away, disappear. "That's me, too," he says.

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His voice is rasping. Some involuntary twitches. Sometimes he gets so tired that his face starts to twitch. He'll blink his eyes and his whole face seems to blink. He just doesn't have the reserves he had when he was young.

"But my father didn't like music," he says. "At all. He might be the only man I ever met who didn't like music. There were two songs he liked--'Puff the Magic Dragon' and 'Easter Parade.' It seemed incongruous." He's talking so softly now, almost whispering. "One's about the magic and wonder of childhood and the hard, cold facts about loss, and the other one is a celebration with hats." He begins to hum, closing his eyes, and then he sings softly: "In your Easter bonne/With all the frills upon it/You'll be the grandest lady/In the Easter Parade."

He wants to go downstairs. He wants Ime to hear the new song he wrote, "Beauty at the Back Door." They follow the arrow down the stairs into Slash's Snakepit, where Marty and Jim, the engineer, are behind the glass. Ime and Billy Bob sit on the little couch.

It's a song about screen doors and myrtle bushes and love, about memory and desire and loss. A little slide guitar, but mostly Billy Bob's voice. It's a spoken-word song, raw, stripped down, a southern-gothic Leonard Cohen.

"My, that's a snappy western shirt you got on," Billy Bob says to Marty faintly. "You goin' to a singin'"

"Yeah, I'm going to a singin'," Marty says.

And then Billy Bob sings another song, called "Poison Honey." His voice is smoky. She draws me in like a moth to a flame / And sometimes at night, I call out her name.

"Albums are supposed to reflect what's going on in your life," Marty says.

Billy Bob laughs. "Then I'm fucked."

There's darkness all around, as the evening shadows fall?/?Time keeps dragging by, but she ain't coming home at all.

Billy Bob listens to the music, his fingers touching his lips. He likes the song, likes where it's going. He crosses his legs, gets comfortable. His eyelids slip down, shut, open, shut. In a few weeks, he'll have run himself down so bad that he'll be in the hospital. But for now, he's got to be up in a few hours, working. His cough will become bronchitis, and an infection will inflame his heart. But in the morning, the extras will be waiting for haircuts. Angie will rush from London to his side. But for now, he folds his hands, nestles them between his knees. The doctor will tell him, You know, Billy Bob, you don't have to starve yourself and not sleep. And Billy Bob, in a burst of light, will promise himself to go on living. But now, his shoulders hunch. The music sounds good, like a dream from childhood. His eyes close.

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